The card company plans to raise its network “assessment” fee to 0.14% from 0.13%, equating to an annual increase of $259.1 million, based on the more than $2 trillion in Mastercard transactions last year, according to the Merchants Payments Coalition, a Washington-based group of retailers that advocates against higher payments fees. The group obtained documents shared with Bloomberg Law showing the increase.
Such assessment fees, charged to the retailer as a percentage on each payment with a Mastercard or Visa, are separate from swipe fees, or interchange fees, which are paid to the bank that issues a credit card. Swipe fees were part of a landmark agreement between Visa and Mastercard last week in which the companies agreed to cap them for five years—saving retailers about $30 billion in an effort to curb litigation going back decades.
Despite last week’s settlement, many merchants plan to go to trial over claims Visa and Mastercard colluded on credit card fees, in hopes of getting monetary relief.
Read More: Visa, Mastercard Swipe Fee Deal Fails to Stem More Litigation
Seth Eisen, spokesperson for Mastercard, said the company let banks know last year about pricing changes separate from interchange fees. “They are designed to ensure that people and businesses continue to have ways to pay and be paid that are hassle-free and worry-free, secure and most convenient for them,” he said in a statement shared with Bloomberg Law.
Doug Kantor, member of the merchant coalition’s executive committee, said the group received clear confirmation about the size of the fee increase and its negative impact on merchants. The card networks make changes to their fees and rules each April and October, but merchants themselves get very little, if any, notice before the new fees take a bite out of their bottom lines, he said.
“It’s one of the ways that is very apparent to us that this settlement is not helpful,” he said, speaking of retailers. “It means, for most of them, fees being sucked out of their pockets without them even realizing what’s going on.”
Visa and Mastercard have raised or created new fees many times since 2011, according to the coalition.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Visa also plans an increase in fees. Visa and Mastercard are the two most common credit card payment networks in the US, followed by Discover Financial Services and American Express Co.